You may feel unworthy of love, but let me remind you that you ARE love. Love courses through your very being. It is the fabric of your existence. To say you are unworthy of it is like saying the sky is unworthy of being the sky because it has clouds in it.
Just because life shows up in a multitude of ways, some of which we deem ‘bad’ does not make you unworthy of love. In fact it makes it all the more necessary to discover the underlying truth of that love that pervades all, that is the groundless ground of it all – the bedrock of existence. It becomes all the more vital to discover the ground of your love so that you don’t get caught in the belief that this or that thought or action IS all there is to you.
Make no mistake, your messy humanness IS part of your divinity. It’s a part of your story, your path, your love song, just as a knot in a tree trunk is part of the tree. But the thing that courses through your veins and through your very being, IS LOVE.
So you might ask how do I learn to recognise that love? How do I learn to love myself, to give myself a much needed dose of Self Love?
But I propose it’s not a case of knowing how to ‘do’ self love at all. Do you know how to fall in love with another for instance? No, it’s not an instruction that you know how to do, it’s something that happens naturally and without effort given the right circumstances. To fall in love you don’t set out with “right, I’m going to fall in love now”. It’s something that happens. Falling in love is a description of a naturally occurring process of unfoldment when we open our hearts.
The best thing to say/do when talking about being more self loving is instead of trying to discover how to self love, notice when you’re not loving towards your self, when there’s a thought or something that’s happening that’s actually NOT self loving. In the noticing of that it can dismantles it immediately, it loosens its grip on you.
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ― Rumi
We cannot muscle our way into self love. Self love is not something we create, it’s the result of where we find ourselves living from when the non-self-acceptance, non-self-trust, non-self-forgiveness, non-self-worthiness is uprooted and dissolved.
To find our love of self – the love that is always there at the heart, the root of all experience, we must find that which obscures it.
It’s a process, often a difficult journey, to root out all those part of ourselves, our deepest darkest corners of non-acceptance, of judgment and shame, of lack of awareness of a part that we feel must be excised, and cut out, avoided or fixed.
Self love starts with the simple, but very difficult task of meeting yourself, as you are, with unconditional acceptance, without judgement and without the need for yourself to be anything other than what you ARE.
To ‘self love’ we must accept that there is no part of ourselves that is truly a mistake. Accepting yourself wholly is not a matter of giving up on personal growth and change, but it is to be with what is, yes even change, to be with that too. To open your palms to life.
Sometimes open palms means opening to our human failings, our anger, our mistrust, and our conditioning. Opening also to the innocent desire to not be subject to all those things, but also opening to the forgiveness that we are still. It’s to be open to it all. The effect of this opening to all of the self, is to be in acceptance with it all, even the non-acceptance, and this is love. This is the fragrance of self love.
I am talking of self love on the human, relative level, the personality quirks, the learned behaviour, the likes and dislikes – all of it. But this leads to a deeper kind of Self love, the kind that recognises, accepts and loves all of life as the expression of the Self, of God, of Divine.
We can start from the more superficial, relative, personal self love, but if we follow the rabbit hole it always leads to the in-personal Self love realisation of it is all Grace.
By the Grace of God go we.
Now, many can get hung up on language here, but what I’m pointing to is the principle that we, the small self, the human being, are the embodiment of God, of the Divine, of the ineffable Source, of the Great Spirit, of Consciousness. And that consciousness is moving in ways that is beyond human comprehension.
To take ownership or claim on our successes or failures is to take false claim. It is all – yes, even choices – an inspiration of life, of God, and that inspiration I call Grace. A seed planted in the heart.
So true Self love bottoms out in this. The acceptance of all of life. The acceptance of the Grace of it all. On a personal, individual level and on a universal level.
To come to a place of acceptance and love, we must first see where the light of awareness hasn’t yet penetrated. Where we won’t go to because we can’t accept. We must throw open the doors of our self to meet our Self.
We must find where we reject, were we judge. Sometimes we have to even start there, with the acceptance the we DO reject or judge some part of ourselves. Bring that closer with tenderness and acceptance and we will find ourselves opening up like the petals of a rose.
Self love isn’t something you force, self love is something that happens when we welcome all parts of ourselves and ultimate life, into the fold.
Self love is a blooming recognition of the love that you are, when the conditioned and limited ideas of life take a backseat to the lived reality of the condition-less naturalness of Being.
A beingness that unconditionally includes all.
